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Reviewed by:
  • Divine Hierarchies: Class in American Religion and Religious Studies
  • Ralph Pyle
Divine Hierarchies: Class in American Religion and Religious StudiesBy Sean McCloud University of North Carolina Press. 2007. 224 pages. $65 cloth, $22.50 paper.

In this book author Sean McCloud enhances our understanding of the connection between religion and social class by acknowledging the importance of cultural resources and situational factors in accounting for the different forms of religious expression associated with affluent and non-affluent groups. Incorporating Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, McCloud emphasizes that cultural resources are associated with class codes that predispose individuals from similar social locations to join particular religious groups.

After outlining his theoretical approach, McCloud examines American scholarship on religion and social class during different time periods. During the age of eugenics (the early 20th century), writers often presented biological accounts which emphasized that “inferior sorts of people” tended toward sectarian religious expression. Although his sampling of anthropological and sociological writings from the time may not perfectly represent the corpus of scholarly work on the topic, McCloud does present evidence that a number of authors embraced eugenic assumptions. McCloud then examines scholarship from the late 1920s to the early 1940s and emphasizes that the emergent deprivation theories of religious behavior shared a common bond with the earlier biological discussions of religious preferences. However, the author stumbles when trying to link Neibuhr’s Social Sources of Denominationalism account with biologically deterministic writings of earlier decades. Although Niebuhr may have used the phrase “intellectual naïveté” to describe economically disfranchised classes drawn to emotional religious expressions, I am not aware that he attributed intellectual deficiency to those groups.

McCloud notes that deprivation theories peaked in studies of religion in the 1960s through the 1970s. His review of the scholarship during this period includes many anthropological accounts of Native American or non-Western religions. The author again stresses the degree to which deprivation accounts echo earlier biological or evolutionary accounts of religious behavior. While McCloud has succeeded in identifying scholarly treatments of religion and social class that may echo earlier eugenic assumptions, it is not clear that those studies represent the larger body of research on religion and economic inequality, and the selection of studies seems slanted to support the author’s claims. Certainly the landmark sociological treatments (e.g., the works of Weber, Troeltsch, Neibuhr and Pope) highlight the importance of social, not biological, factors in accounting for people’s religious behavior. It is more likely that many deprivation scholars evince a middle-class bias or a mainline Protestant bias when [End Page 1512] describing sectarian religion, and in that sense they may be portraying sectarian adherents in a patronizing fashion.

Toward the end of the book McCloud discusses four major theologies of class in American religion and then presents an interesting ethnographic account of services at two Holiness Pentecostal congregations in the Ohio River Valley. One of the churches is a small independent Pentecostal church whose members engage in spontaneous expressions of ecstatic worship. The other is a larger Church of God congregation that is experiencing an influx of middle-class members and seems to be accommodating to mainstream cultural styles. McCloud argues that deprivation theories fail to fully explain the differences between these churches. Incorporating insights from his theoretical model, McCloud focuses on differences in praise styles, clothing and music at the two congregations. He stresses that the different styles of worship at these churches are not just a reflection of the members’ social class positions, but are reflective of differences in pastoral style, institutional affiliation and growth trajectories. It is interesting to note that the author’s analysis of congregational accommodation here seems to affirm the basic insights of the sect-to-denomination model of religious change that he earlier criticizes.

McCloud rightly suggests that deprivation accounts of religious behavior tend to ignore other factors that help to explain sectarian affiliation, such as recruitment techniques, group commitment mechanisms and other external contextual factors. In addition, he has successfully moved beyond traditional accounts of religion and social class by incorporating elements of Bourdieu’s discussion of social class in his model. Although the author’s blanket condemnation of deprivation...

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